Try it yourself
Four meta descriptions for the same page. This is the grey sentence under the blue headline in a search result — it does not decide your position, it decides whether anyone clicks it.
Which one earns the click?
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Google will invent one by pulling a sentence off the page. Sometimes that is fine. Sometimes it is your cookie banner.
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Present, and it says nothing at all. A searcher reading this learns no more than they knew before.
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This is the one. It names the service, the area, and the three things somebody with a burst pipe actually wants to know. About 155 characters, so it survives being shown in full.
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A list of keywords is not a sentence. It reads as spam to the one person deciding whether to click, and it has not helped rankings in well over a decade.
Pick a line. Every one of them has an answer.
Show me the answer
<meta name="description" content="Emergency plumber covering Ashford and the surrounding villages. No callout fee, usually with you inside two hours, and a fixed price before we start.">
This is the one. It names the service, the area, and the three things somebody with a burst pipe actually wants to know. About 155 characters, so it survives being shown in full.
The written version
Meta descriptions: the sentence under your headline →
How to check your own site for this, what to change, and how to confirm it worked.
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